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| Director James Foley (left) with Dustin Hoffman on the set of Confidence. |
The following is a portion of the transcript taken from a Q & A with director James Foley (with screenwriter Dough Jung) conducted at the American Film Institute in April, 2003 following a screening of his new movie, Confidence.
Peter Markham: For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Peter Markham of the Directing Faculty. We are very privileged to have writer Doug Jung and director James Foley today. Let me say a little about Doug for you. Doug graduated from the NYU Tisch School of Arts, has worked in various capacities and is quite a new writer. Confidence is his first feature film. He is currently working on other projects at Universal for producer Laura Bickford who produced Traffic. Let me also introduce James Foley to you. As you can see (from the handouts) he has many distinguished credits to his name, such as At Close Range, Who’s That Girl?, Glengarry Glen Ross, and a particular favorite of mine, After Dark My Sweet. James has a mastery of broad tonal range which must be the envy of many directors and it’s thrilling to have him here today. Thank you, James. [applause]
Peter Markham (MM): Looking at the territory of something like David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and the Jim Thomson novel After Dark My Sweet, there seems to be a thread that you are following. Did those films inform your work on this film or did they inform your choice of going for this movie?
James Foley (JF): I’m sure it informed stuff; I’m stuck in the same brain. For better or worse I’m not conscious that there is any kind of thread other than reading a bunch of scripts. Most scripts suck and you don’t want to do them and you read one that’s good and you do want to do that. So what you think is good is going to have a certain consistency to it… In this particular case I think I was most drawn to the idea that it was like a playground of subtext where the subtext was actually text in terms of story points and plot points. It also had a kind of tone about it that was really appealing to me in the sense that [when] I finished the script I had a smile and a certain kind of feeling that I haven’t experienced before. I had a real desire to go live in that world. Even now that I’ve seen it a few times, I still like to watch the last six or seven minutes when the Coldplay song comes on because it’s the first time I’ve made a movie with a happy ending. The boy kisses the girl, the pop song comes on, fade to black.
MM: What interested me so much about this film was that it was a combination of very streamlined plotting and storytelling, but it’s also very rich in character and character revelation. Was that what you think drew you to it and excited you?
JF: Well, it certainly drew me to it. [Screenwriter] Doug [Jung] probably has a different experience with the project that precedes me, but I’ve been asked a lot about con movies and references to other con movies. And, as dumb as I am, I never thought about the fact that it was a con movie and that it existed in some genre. In this period, when reviews start trickling out and I start railing against anything that is less than stellar, this idea that it doesn’t obey certain rules stuff drives me up a wall! As if somehow someone handed you a rule book about how con movies are and if you divert from that… I am blissfully ignorant of con movies and I was drawn to the idea that this had such an intricate plot—that it was pleasurable to turn the page and see what happens next…
MM: Coming back to the notion of the con artist genre, if there is such a thing… Ed Burns and Rachel Weisz are kind of scamming and cheating all the way through but in the end find real love. I’m wondering if there’s a parallel to the writer and the director and the actors in the sense that they’re all con artists tricking the audience. The audience is the perhaps the ‘mark’ and they are tricking the audience in order to arrive at a truth if the movie is going to be successful.
JF: I hadn’t thought about it that way. There is collusion among the actors and myself and Doug. The fact that a truth is happened upon is cooperative, and so it’s the best kind of cooperative con—and the best kind of moviemaking experience… As opposed to most movie experiences, [which are] more akin to the guys who are conning in Glengarry Glen Ross—cannibalistic and destructive. The ending of Glengarry Glen Ross (the movie, not the experience of making the movie itself) [is] more emblematic of the typical Hollywood experience.
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MM: Do you think that there is something [to] the Mamet idea of the philosophy of relationships, whereby any relationship is based on a confidence trick to some extent?
JF: What is the definition of a confidence trick? Does that mean a scam or…
MM: Well, one is in it for oneself I suppose is what I’m saying, which kind of makes true love impossible.
JF: Yeah, it becomes really semantic and crazy. In this case I think the pleasurable surprise of the movie is that that is not the case. We have been led to believe it at certain times, but it turns out that all our principal people—including Andy Garcia—are not conning each other. They were cooperating with each other and they were telling the truth to each other, and I think that is a viscerally very pleasurable thing to realize at the end. It kind of stirs warm thoughts.
MM: There is quite a degree of consensus among certain areas of film pedagogy that you shouldn’t use voiceover. I personally love it. I love the many different ways of using it.
JF: Yeah, I’ve used voice over once before in a very different way in After Dark My Sweet. Of course, it was in Jim Thompson’s novel and it’s all to do with point of view. It that case there was such a rigid first person internal point of view that it seemed inexorable that that was what you had to do. It’s amazing how many scripts I read where you can’t tell whose point of view the movie is being told from. It’s being told from no one’s point of view. It’s some kind of objective, distanced crap. [laughter] So one of the things I really liked about Confidence was that the point of view was being played with, but it was essentially Ed Burns’ (the protagonist’s) point of view. That’s the sort of anchor I’m looking for in terms of everything that follows.
In After Dark My Sweet I remember we were going to shoot a scene and Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern came up to me and they said they had this cool thing they thought of doing before Jason Patric, the protagonist, came into the room. I had to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. The story doesn’t really exist until he comes into the room, so I’ll have to cut it anyway.’ And they couldn’t understand what I meant: ‘What do you mean it doesn’t exist?’ I had to say that we were seeing everything through his eyes so we can’t show something that he doesn’t see, or else the whole consistency of the point of view gets wrecked.
MM: [In working with your cinematographer,] are you setting up certain questions, visually speaking? Are you looking for what your journey is going to be, [with] your cinematographer and production designer helping you articulate what it actually is?
JF: Yeah. I don’t like reading a script too many times because I think the first time you read it as a director, that’s going to be what an audience is going to see—whatever you reacted to the first time. I like to remember that feeling to make more of those kinds of decisions and not start reading and re-reading and deconstructing and thinking about it, because then you start getting intellectual ideas and I’m really against making references to any other film. To me it’s blasphemous to make references to other films in talking about shots… Of course every decision you make is influenced unconsciously by every movie you’ve ever seen, but I like to think you can get as influenced by your eye driving down the 101 and moving a certain speed and that was a shot that is now in your head. Not thinking about it as a shot, but when you go to make a shot, you will be creating something that is based on your entire history of visual experience and not just what you’ve seen in movies.
MM: I guess the eye and the heart have a certain intelligence, too, and that is what you’re talking about.
JF: Yeah, a direct connection between them and bypass your brain.
MM: And how does that then influence the work with the editor? How do you proceed?
JF: I used to write detailed notes to the editor about how to cut things together and then I realized that I could always go back and do that—do what I intended—and tell him nothing and see what he does on his own. Because [the editor] will come up with something I haven’t thought about. And if I don’t like it I can go back and do what I did think about. In this case, I had a great experience with editor [Stuart Levy], because I didn’t tell him anything and he wound up doing. In many ways, things I hadn’t thought of the exact way he did it but it was toward [the same] goal. So it added a whole other dimension. It was the best collaboration I’ve had with an editor so far.
MM: How far ahead do you plan that very dynamic approach to transitions—the swish pans, the smash cuts?
JF: Usually it begins on the first day. You just dive in… Then, of course, your responsibility as a director is to be very conscious of transitions and somehow it just seems right to go out of black and see the scene and go black again and then you have to connect those things. And then secondarily it becomes whether anyone gives a shit about what you’ve accomplished. Even if they don’t, there’s a satisfaction of accomplishing what you set out to do.
MM: With a very fast shooting schedule [35 days]… do you find you’re forced to do more set-ups per day than you want? Are you a director, in other words, who would rather do more takes and less set-ups, or do you like the energy of a relatively fast moving day?
JF: The faster the better. I have no interest in going to my trailer and waiting; I’d love to just shoot all day long. But my experience is that there are never enough hours in a day—no matter what the budget is—to do as many set-ups as I want to do. And I just take it upon myself to play that game in my head. As the day progresses, I start dropping things from my list and going down the page with what do I have to get.
In terms of the filming, there wasn’t that much improv. Anything that happened was mainly from Dustin but that was just in the script. I am very aware of kind of keeping a rein on that because if an actor is struggling with a moment; if they have that escape valve of being able to say other words it’s just dancing around the problem of not being able to make the word work. So I learned my lesson to try to discourage that, but it’s a moment by moment decision.
I’ll tell you, my shooting of Glengarry Glenn Ross was interesting because it went so fast and so friction free. There was never any problem between those guys. I thought about it a lot afterwards and it was because of this assumption that the script was the bible and nobody was going to question it. Once we couldn’t figure out what it meant, so Jack Lemon, Ed Harris and I called up David Mamet, who had written the script long before and didn’t have anything to do with the movie, and he just said, “Good luck.” But anyway, I called him and said we really tried to figure out what this means and we are at a loss and he was silent and he said, “Say it again.” And I did and he said, “I don’t know what the hell that means.” And I said, “Oh.” And he said, “It’s probably a typo.” [laughter] So I said, “Alright, well, what do you think it should be?” And he said, “Oh I don’t know, why don’t you guys just improvise something?” And I remember being so surprised that we were all being so Catholic about it and he was saying to just improvise something, which we then did.
MM: Before we come to an end, are there any mantras that you would like to give these new filmmakers? Any other pearls of wisdom you can give us?
JF: I’ve got a pearl of wisdom. Coming here today and talking about it is useful to myself in a selfish way. It forces me to rejuvenate my own perspective and energy level from when I was graduating from USC. The thing I’ve come to learn is the most valuable thing that any filmmaker or director or writer has is his particular point of view. It’s more valuable than any technical ability. It’s more valuable than intelligence, it’s more valuable than anything. I think cinema is so exciting because I can go as an audience member and see the world in a way that is different than what I can see with my own eyes.
Those moviemakers who are doing something personal and subjective no matter what the story is—they don’t have to have written it but it’s just how they see the world and that is a very valuable thing. It’s not valued by Hollywood very much. Studios don’t care about a director’s vision, they care about a director being a good shooter. I’ve heard that word and it sends chills up my spine… as if there are directors out there who mechanically record images. They better look good and the movie stars better look good and that’s that.
The idea that it’s a subjective worldview is not talked about much, and to me it’s the most important thing. The truth of the matter is that the good directors are people who have a vision and keep it to themselves from a studio point of view and turn out a movie that is particular. If you stick to your guns every day of shooting and cut it all together then it’s going to be your particular vision. But every step along the way there is constant pressure to compromise that. Everybody wants to come in and tell you what their vision is and how they see things. My answer is always, “That’s interesting, that could work in your movie.” [laughter]
The last thing I want to say about that is the biggest lesson I learned on my first movie was not to be afraid of being fired. I remember being pressured by a producer to do something that I felt was wrong and I just walked away. I remember I was being paid $85,000 and I was just out of film school and I’d already gotten half of it and I thought I would be rich for life on $42,500. So I thought the worst thing that could happen if I refuse to do what he wants was that I would get fired. So I decided that was alright and I went back and said, “No.” That was the end of that—we just went on and it’s something that I like to remind myself over time because I don’t ever want to feel as if I am doing something out of fear.